It’s been suggested that former Nintendo hacker Gary Bowser is involved with a third-party Nintendo Switch device called the MIG-Switch, but Bowser claims he has nothing to do with it.
The MIG-Switch is a Switch flash cart, which was announced over the holidays and will apparently allow people to back up their Switch games across all standard Switch consoles without any modification. Such a device, however, could be used to install ROMs and other illegally acquired games, so Nintendo will likely step in and threaten legal action.
What’s particularly shocking, however, according to a new video by Modern Vintage Gamer published on Jan. 2, is that hacking group Team Xcuter, which has attracted Nintendo’s ire in the past, is allegedly behind this new device. This apparently includes Gary Bowser.
If the name rings a bell, that’s because Gary Bowser was arrested and fined over $14 million in damages for helping create and sell hacked Nintendo devices. He was also sentenced to 40 months in prison but was released early due to good behavior. Although he’s no longer behind bars, Bowser is still expected to pay Nintendo the damages, with the company believed to be taking a cut from any salary he earns.
Modern Vintage Gamer purports finding Bowser’s own website within the DNS records for AfterTimeX, a separate website where videos for the MIG-Switch first appeared. However, Bowser has denied having any sort of involvement with the device, saying as much on X (formerly Twitter) on Jan. 3.
In a more thorough explanation on Discord, as seen and transcribed by VGC, Bowser claims, “I was the subject of DNS poisoning attack on my nameservers, I repaired the damage and changed all my passwords, but sadly people will talk, not what I needed just before Christmas.
“And also just a day after someone was threatening me via Skype, demanding I send them $1,000 per month for next 40 months, or they would leak a bunch of shit. I am not going to engage the trolls or comment on it.”
Whether or not the rest of Team Xecuter is involved, it’s difficult to imagine Bowser himself ever getting tangled up in this sort of thing again. Bowser is in his fifties, so unless he enjoys some kind of windfall, he’s probably never going to completely pay that $14 million fine to Nintendo. Surely the last thing he’d want is additional fines. If caught again, the punishment would likely be more severe and result in a longer prison sentence, such as the five years Nintendo originally pushed for Bowser to go to jail.
